The Fourth Biblical Base for Church Planting

The Church Functioning According to God Will Manifest a “Yearning” Fourth, as Charles Van Engen explains, when the church functions as the “true church” it will manifest certain characteristics. One of these will be a profound desire to see others come into fellowship: The true church “Yearns” for the incorporation of those persons, groups, and cultures which will gather with it in fellowship around the one Head of the Body, and thus construct a true, loving, growing, serving demonstration of koinonia. This is true biblical motivation that causes new churches to come into being. This motivation is a supernatural, Spirit-given desire that incites to evangelism. Churches that have this “yearning” will never be content with one church in one area but they will reproduce themselves so that more and more regions are touched with the gospel and new churches are born. This is where daughter church planting finds its highest motivational level. The Wonderful Power of “Spontaneous Expansion” Within the Church Fifth, although to a degree implied in the other reasons, the church of Jesus Christ has within itself the wonderful power of what the renowned missiologist Roland Allen called “spontaneous expansion.” He perceptively saw that this expansion was not just the expansion of this or that congregation but was more than that. This then is what I mean by spontaneous expansion. I mean the expansion which follows the unexhorted and unorganized activity of individual members of the Church explaining to others the Gospel which they have found for themselves; I mean the expansion which follows the irresistible attraction of the Christian Church for men who see its ordered life, and are drawn to it by desire to discover the secret of a life which they instinctively desire to share; I mean also the expansion of the Church by the addition of new churches.